


Prepare thyself to live again

by Dussek



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Body Horror, Gen, Possession, The Beholding, The Spiral, The Stranger - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 12:32:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13054065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dussek/pseuds/Dussek
Summary: Michael has surprisingly good advice, for a being whose nature is to lie. Jon is rather in the dark, for a person claimed by Beholding. And Sasha is, despite being Not for a while.





	Prepare thyself to live again

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kay_obsessive](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kay_obsessive/gifts).



> Set shortly after MAG83; contains spoilers until then. A merry Yuletide to you!

 

> _There are three deaths: the first is when the body ceases to function.  The second is when the body is consigned to the grave.  The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time._

Jon sets down the glass of water he’d been in the kitchen to fetch and turns the scrap of paper over in his hands. The strange clarity that’d come to him when he’d seen the folder hasn’t left him; he’s aware of the way his breath makes the scrap flutter, breathing out a shuddering sigh. It’d fluttered out of the plain manila folder addressed to him. The left margin is a touch ragged, ripped right out of the spine, but the bottom margin's been clearly cut with a pair of scissors. There's nothing on the back.

There's a faint buzzing in his head, the one that means _record._ He steadies himself against the kitchen counter for a second, feeling the cool marble. Fighting it down. For a second, it passes, and there's the thin victory of the scrap fluttering to the floor. But when he raises his head, the folder catches his eye, and he just knows that there's another statement inside, one that has to be recorded, and researched, and archived. Just as he knows that he will. To the best of his limited ability here, anyway.

“Right,” he says to the still kitchen air, and slips the paper back into the folder, holding it against his chest. Thinking about it, thinking about how or why he _needs_ to do these things, will make him either furious or scared. Probably both.

And so he takes the glass of water. Upstairs, to his tape recorder.

Michael is leaning against the doorway.

The glass slips from his hand, shattering on Georgie’s kitchen floor and dousing his bare feet with water. He clenches the folder tightly to his chest.

It's a few moments before Michael speaks, and when it does, its voice trails off.

“I must admit, this is not what I hoped for…”

There’s a knife sitting on the kitchen counter not three feet from Jon. He reaches over for it for appearance’s sake.

Michael doesn’t laugh, but the corners of its eyes crinkle. It would have almost looked like a human smile, except the crinkles run deep and wrong. It inspects its fingernails casually, as if they are not at the end of hands impossible to describe.

“What do you want?” Jon asks, toes curling against the cool kitchen tile. His voice is steadier than his hands.

“Sitting like a spider pretending it hasn’t lost it’s web…it doesn’t suit you, Archivist.”

Jon swallows, hard, but doesn’t say anything.

Michael watches him for a second, then reaches out. Jon stays still. It shouldn’t have been able to reach him from where he was. He stays silent as those razor fingers touch his cheek, although his head pounds in pain from watching those joints unfurling impossibly. When Michael speaks again, its voice sounds strained.

“Your little assistant.”

Jon’s fingers tighten around the knife. “If you threaten Martin - or Tim -“

The finger abruptly stops, with a slight sting of pain through Jon’s cheek. Michael tilts its head at him. “You’ll do what?”

There’s nothing – he has nothing, knows nothing, might as well be nothing against these powers. He brings the knife up, and notes distantly that his hand doesn’t even shake.

Michael smiles, a toothy, bright smile. Jon is not at all surprised to see a few too many teeth. It steps back, raising its hands. They cut long shadows through the morning light. “The other one, Archivist.” It resumes his casual lean against the doorway

Jon swallows. It’s still hard to think about her, through the haze of guilt. “S-Sasha.”

Michael is still smiling, “You remember her name. Encouraging.”

Jon closes his eyes as it picks up a shard of broken glass from the floor without moving from the doorway somehow. He opens his eyes at the faint, awful scraping noise – it’s just its fingers, scratching against the glass. Then Michael raises it, looking through it at him. For a moment, Jon catches glimpses; a familiar woman, slumped against a wall. A man, looking around wildly. The glass turns at a different angle, and he sees Michael again, looking through the glass at him. It lowers it, replacing it on the floor where it had been, and nods in satisfaction.

He shies away from the question of what it sees through the glass, when it looks at him that way.

“I think you know what should be done.”

That itch is there again, behind his eyes, in his head. The itch to record. But just thinking about Sasha – about the thing that replaced her – makes that ache intensify. It feels like an axe is splitting his head in two.

That is probably appropriate.

“Record a statement. On tape. About her.”

Michael hums. The sound is profoundly exhausting to Jon. The adrenaline that’s gotten him through other encounters with Michael doesn’t seem to be lasting him through this one, never mind the fact that Michael could decide to fillet him at any given second. He’s standing here in his – well, _ex_ would imply that their relationship had actually been a proper relationship, which was a bit much – he’s standing here in an acquaintance’s kitchen in wet socks, and he’s gotten one night of rest after the latest recording, and he’s tired of facing down horrors, and he’s tired of this ache in his head and his heart when he thinks about a woman and can’t remember what she really looked like, whether the flashes of memory are real or his desperate imagination filling in blanks.

“I don’t know what’s her and what’s – what’s the Not-her,” he says, tiredly setting the knife down and pinching his temples for a second. Tries to mitigate the pounding in his head, which is only made worse by Michael’s little giggle. He opens his eyes to glare at it and the utterly unremarkable door behind it that hadn’t been there five seconds ago. “I don’t know how to filter out – what’s right.”

“Really, Archivist.” Michael says, hand on the doorknob. The pounding in Jon’s head seems to lessen if he keeps his eyes on Michael. “Asking me for job advice? A very poor decision, even by your standards.”

"Why are you _giving_ advice?" A flash of memory from the conversation with Leitner. “They called you _Es mentiras.”_

“I like it,” Michael says, steepling his fingers together. He’s standing in the infinite doorway.

“I want to know why I should consider taking the advice of a being devoted to lies.” He looks Michael in the eye, then hesitates and moves his head down a little. Over the rim of his glasses, Michael looks its usual self. Through them, its mouth is turned down a little, and its head is so slightly turned to the side. He would have brushed it off, but for the fact that when he focuses his gaze on the upper brim of his glasses, he can see both at once.

“What’s a liar without truth-tellers, Archivist?”

Both Michaels flash that toothy, sharp smile again, and the door closes with a creak and a gust of stale air. He blinks, and the door is already gone.

\---

There’s a crack of light in the room.

It hurts to look at, quite a lot, although that may just be because she hasn’t seen anything in a long time. And it’s strange, but not in the tasty way. Light means that she can be seen, if she steps into it. Can be examined.

That fear keeps her in place for a moment, but something she hasn’t felt in quite a while is stronger. Curiosity. She does not know how long she has been here. Once she’d tried to keep track, tried to count her own heartbeats, but she’d lost place around two hundred thousand. This is the first thing that has been different.

So she unspindles, stiff limbs crackling like glass, and notices that the space is too small to stand. That’s two things that she has noticed now.

Her mind turns over some more things, rustily. She is not entirely confident about the sort of body she should have, but she is pretty sure that human bodies do not unspindle. The little beam of light does not illuminate her surroundings at all, just the patch of floor it lands on, like a particularly intense spotlight. That is not how normal light works. That patch of floor is wooden, but something about it also seems odd.

So she moves closer to investigate, and remembers that that is what she did, once upon a time. Investigate. It makes her heart jump, and she reaches out.

A hand moves into the light. It is not her hand. It is not a hand at all.

After a moment, she wills it to curl up. And it does. So it must be hers. Even though it’s all wrong. This reasoning helps subdue the fear in her throat.

There is also something else. The light is growing smaller. She follows it up, to the crack it’s coming through. There are threads weaving back over it, tiny threads that eat away at the corners of the light and will cloak her, choke her, if she stays here. The threads do not care that she is herself and not _it_ (for right now, at least). The monster in her does not want to move into the light, but the part of her that is human reaches out, spindling those horrible arms towards the eye-shaped crack, and pulls at it with everything, pulling it towards herself, or pulling herself towards it, and the light spills over her -

The box shatters, wooden splinters flying everywhere, and Sasha is on the floor of the archives, pulled like taffy into a shape she shouldn’t be in, and calliope is not pronounced that way, and once her cousin had pushed her off the swingset and she’d fought him, and the worms would come, were coming, had come. And she is here now, in Artifact Storage, surrounded by splinters of a small box that belonged at the heart of a certain table.

She rolls over, coughing at the cool stale air, things that become fingers scrabbling at the floor for purchase. As she’s trying to catch her breath, she sees the shadow on the floor.

“Welcome back,” Michael says.

Sasha gives one final cough and looks up at it. She is not entirely prepared to see through its skin, and frowns at the slowly changing patterns underneath.

It kneels next to her prone form, dagger hand reaching for her own, thankfully human one. After a moment, she places her hand in its, and watches as Michael gently turns it over, and makes a pleased noise.

She yanks her hand back. She is unpracticed at being Sasha, but that is what she would have done, yes. “What?” She wants it to be a snap, but it comes out as more of a hoarse croak.

Michael doesn’t answer, instead unfolding itself up and back through the door. “This will be so much better,” it says, and smiles, tapping the tips of its fingers together four times. Its fingers make little crunching sounds as it does. Sasha’s eyes flicker from him to her fingers for a moment; when she looks back, he’s gone.

It takes her a few moments to see what Michael had been looking for. Half of her nods in satisfaction. Sasha, now, is who she becomes, not who she is; there will be things that will be missing. In any case, it will be easier to pick up evidence if she does not have to worry about leaving fingerprints.

**Author's Note:**

> The quote at the beginning is from Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman.


End file.
